Current server platforms may provide centralized repositories for sharing documents. These repositories may contain large numbers of various types of documents. Such server platforms provide a search functionality wherein a user provides a set of keywords, and documents containing any similar content are returned. A limitation of this design is that current search functionalities return entire documents as search results when, oftentimes, individual components of the returned documents can be reused instead of the entire document.
Additionally, many times relationships between documents or individual components of documents exist that may be valuable to the user. For example, a workbook in an electronic spreadsheet application, such as Excel®, may contain a piece of business logic in the form of a calculation. A user creating a different workbook may, rather than recreating that business logic or calculation, reuse the existing logic by copying and pasting the business logic from the first workbook into the new workbook. The business logic may be reused in various workbooks or other types of documents. If changes are made to the existing business logic item, the changes may not be communicated to the other workbooks and documents that have reused the same business logic. Current search functionalities do not provide for automatically searching and retrieving shared business logic in various documents in a repository.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.